Plexus Container Annotations and Maven 2 Mojos

I’ll make it short: it’s a mess. You can’t use plexus container 1.5-tooling (with java annotations), if you have to load your components in a plexus 1.0.x-container – which is the case, if your components are utilized in a Maven 2.2.x Mojo. This is simply because plexus container 1.5.x uses “default” as a default role-hint, while NULL is the default in plexus 1.0.x.

But you can use the old tooling, plexus-maven-plugin. But by default it fails if it sees any annotation in your source code, because it uses a version of qdox that doesn’t know annotations yet.

Also, when generating the component descriptor it doesn’t merge with the manually defined one in src/resources (the new one does).

And since, by default, the merge-descriptors goal runs before descriptor (generate) goal, you have to do some back flips to get that running too.

Well here is a configuration that works. At least in my project. Today.